Synthesis of Analytical and Field Data on Sediment Transport over an Active Bay Shoal

This paper reports field measurements of bed and suspended load transport of marine sand measured in-situ on a bay shoal over several spring tides and relates these to analytical assessments of van Rijn. The synthesis of the field and analytical data aims to calibrate the analytical models, providing additional insight on bed-load transport thicknesses, bed load and suspended sediment concentrations. The field study site comprised a sand shoal featuring large sand waves attesting to high sediment transport rates under strong tidal flows. Bed load transport data comprised velocities using a combination of ADCP acoustic and GPS technologies. Bed sediments were sampled and tested for grain size distribution and fall velocities. Suspended transport data comprised ADCP backscatter information with suspended sediment sampling. Some 20,000 data points comprising depth-averaged and bed load velocities and backscatter data have been processed with fall velocity and sieved grain size data. The results inform the goodness of fit of the analytical approaches and the scale of the natural random scatter in field measurements.